Are there any suggestions on how I might be able to shoot from that angle in the future to generate good images? Perhaps manipulating some variables like weather conditions, lighting conditions, or changing the elevation of the camera to get less foliage in the foreground? I did not crop or straiten the image and just did a quick color balance with iPhoto.

I remember having seen pictures similar to the one below and wanting to replicate them.

First thing is find an angle that doesn't have any foreground obstruction. Once you've got that, then you'll need to work on the quality. Did you use an tripod? It will be essential to get a sharp, low-noise image. Can't really tell on your image above, whether the lack of quality is due to your editing, or just a poor image overall (as would likely be the case if you shot it hand-held). After that, everything else is minor.

There is some red in the middle of the tail there and I think it is a reflection of the red airfield boundary lights. Should I worry about that at all? I could get rid of it with the clone stamp tool without too much work but I'd rather not touch up these photo's that much. In that same light, the sky appears to be a little noisy in the back ground even though I used a low ISO (200 I think) for this shot. I was thinking about grabbing the whole sky in a new layer in PS and using the blur tool to hide the noise. Would this be going too far for the spirit and purpose of photo's in this database? So far that is just a crop and playing with the handles on the histogram in terms of editing.